Forty-Something Guy Learns Guitar Via The Internet!

I was walking by the music store about eight months ago and saw a very nice looking guitar in the window. While I was looking at the guitar, a sales person came outside and we started talking. I had been thinking about learning the guitar but was a bit reluctant because I had tried twice before in my life (when I was twelve and then again at eighteen) and failed. However, when the sales person offered me a special deal, I couldn’t resist and left the store the owner of a new acoustic guitar.

Since I had now had a guitar, I needed lessons. One of my favorite places on the Internet is the auction site, eBay. Off I went and searched for “learn guitar”. A lot of people on eBay want to sell you CD’s or DVD’s to teach you to play the guitar. The two times I tried to learn guitar before involved spending three weeks trying to smoothly shift between C, F, and G chords and then giving up because it seemed like it would take forever to make pleasant sounds. I was looking for a way to learn guitar that was different than my previous efforts. Guitar Concept sells their course at eBay and it seemed to be the thing I was looking for. I downloaded the demo, liked what I saw, and then bought the CD.

Guitar Concept starts you off with pentatonic scales and learning different modes. I was finally able to make pleasant sounds with the guitar – a major breakthrough. I was learning the minor pentatonic scale, going up the scale and then down, and thought it might be easier to memorize the scale if I played the notes of the scale out of sequence. The result sounded like I had just made some music. I stopped, laughed out loud and thought, “Wow, this is so cool”. One of the best things about Guitar Concept is that there’s a real person behind it who answers your questions.

The Guitar Concept web site has a links section that started me looking for sites with good information for a new guitar player. I discovered Guitar Noise (just as you obviously have!) and spent quite a few weeks trying to digest everything. I used Guitar Noise initially to help me figure out music theory. The Power of Three, and Moving on Up, both by David Hodge, were particularly helpful in taking the mystery out of chords. I could make chords all over the fretboard – not just in the “standard” places.

Another useful link from the Guitar Concept site is to Guitar For Beginners And Beyond. This site has free fingerstyle lessons. Most of the lessons even come with a movie. Always On My Mind is my favorite lesson here.

One of the links on the Guitar Noise site is to Darrin Koltow’s Maximum Musician site. I found a book here, “Blues Grooves for Beginners” that changed my life (really, it did). I discovered how much fun it is to play the blues. One of the songs in the book, “Souped Up Shuffle” seemed to be way too hard for me ever to play. One five-note section of this song took me twenty seconds to play because my left hand just didn’t get it. I stuck with it and now use this song as a warm-up exercise that I can play without even thinking too much. An important lesson for me – things that look hard can often be made easy with lots of practice. My success with this book gave me confidence to tackle other things that looked too hard.

While exploring the Maximum Musician site I stumbled across a link to Truefire. This was another life altering discovery. Truefire contains thousands of guitar lessons at a reasonable cost. A typical lesson costs $2.50 and comes with an MP3, PDF and often a Powertab file. Dave Rubin has an excellent lesson for a beginner called “Eight to the Bar”. Keith Wyatt has a blues primer that has lots of good bits. I thought that slides and hammers and pull-offs were too hard but I downloaded a David Blacker lesson called “Delta Blues Essentials” and can now slide and hammer all over the place. It sounds so cool doing a hammer on to the B string followed by a slide from the 2nd fret to the 4th fret on the high E string. If you can’t find what you’re looking for at Guitar Noise, head over to Truefire.

Mark Stefani is a major presence at Truefire. Some of his lessons are difficult but others, like, “Boogie Woogie Shuffle”, only look difficult and, with a lot of practice, are great fun to play. Mark has his own website that has many free lessons.

One of the lessons at Truefire contained a link to Acoustic Guitar Workshop. I thought that I would be happy to always use just a pick. After listening to some of the fingerstyle lessons here, I was hooked and purchased the course, “Fingerstyle Blues 1”. The last lesson in the course is a song called “Fishing Blues”. It sounds truly amazing when I get it right. I haven’t forgotten my pick but fingerstyle blues are a lot of fun to play.

One of my goals at the start of my guitar adventure was to learn my favorite song, If You Could Read My Mind. I got an “Easy Guitar” book from the library and managed to play the melody of the song without too much trouble but it was strangely unsatisfying. The song sounded too much like “plink, plink, plink”. Back to Guitar Noise I went and found Arranging Things by David Hodge and Birth of a Chord Melody by Graham Merry to teach me all about the wonderful world of chord melody. I now have a decent arrangement of the song. It still needs work but it no longer goes “plink, plink, plink”.

While I was looking for different versions of If You Could Read My Mind, I discovered GuitarPro and the GuitarPro archive. GuitarPro is a neat tool to let you edit music. MySongBook contains almost 40,000 songs in the GuitarPro format-something for everybody. One interesting use of GuitarPro is to change a song’s key. If a song appears difficult to play, you can try changing its key. Sometimes it becomes a lot easier in a different key.

During my never-ending search of places to help me learn guitar, I encountered Guitar Principles several times. The site’s main product is a book called The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar. I was always a bit afraid to visit the site because I might learn I was doing everything wrong and was a hopeless case. I took the plunge and bought the book and found it extremely useful. I was horrified to see how much my left hand fingers were flapping in the breeze and how much tension I had. The book helps a player to recognize tension and to avoid it. Before this book I wondered why bending strings was so hard. I realized, after reading the book, that it’s almost impossible to bend a string with a tense left hand.

I spend a lot of time at Guitar Noise looking for interesting things to learn. In the blues section, I found a lesson from Olav Torvund, a Norwegian lawyer who also has a passion for the blues. His site has hundreds of lessons about blues guitar and, for people like myself who don’t speak Norwegian, the site is also in English. Playing the “Hoochie Coochie Shuffle” from this site is just so much fun it should be illegal.

While poking around at torvund.net, I found an excellent site to buy sheet music and guitar instruction books called SheetMusicPlus.com. This site is easy to navigate and the company is very reliable. I have already bought several books from the web site. You can search for “easy guitar” at this site and get hundreds of books that have songs from your favourite artists arranged for the beginning to intermediate guitar player.

I’m eight months into becoming a guitar player so what’s next? I seem to have a fairly common guitar disease – “75 percentitis.” I learn 75% of a song and then get distracted and don’t learn the whole song. So lately, I’ve been re-visiting my favorites and learning the whole song. I’m also learning St Louis Blues from the Acoustic Guitar Workshop and have just bought a book at SheetMusicPlus called Classic Blues for Easy Guitar that has songs like, Boom Boom and Sweet Home Chicago arranged for easy guitar. This book is going to be a lot of fun. Hurt by David Hodge at Guitar Noise is also on my current list of things to practice. I think it’s impossible to see the Johnny Cash video of Hurt and not get a lump in your throat.

I have also started working on the dreaded C, F, G chord change but something mysterious has happened. It’s not as hard as I remembered. Amazing.

Learning guitar is hard work but it’s really important to have fun and have your guitar make cool sounds while you’re learning all the hard bits.

Thanks for listening!